For the first time, you can install genuinely open-source firmware on a modern AMD Ryzen desktop board, and it boots Ubuntu 26.04 without any workarounds.
3mdeb, the Polish firmware engineering shop behind the Dasharo project, shipped v0.9.0 for the MSI PRO B850-P WIFI on July 30, 2026. It runs on coreboot paired with AMD’s openSIL, the silicon initialization library AMD has spent years building as an eventual replacement for its closed-source AGESA. That combination has existed on AMD server boards for a couple of months now. This is the first time it has landed on a desktop AM5 motherboard anyone can actually buy.
The Quick Version
- What happened: 3mdeb released Dasharo v0.9.0, the first open-source firmware for a modern AMD Ryzen desktop board
- The board: MSI PRO B850-P WIFI, a normal AM5 ATX board on sale right now
- The chips it supports: AMD Phoenix (Zen 4) only, meaning the Ryzen 8000G series
- The number everyone’s repeating: 79.1% less closed-source firmware code than MSI’s stock BIOS
- The catch: one board, one narrow chip family, and four documented bugs
Why This Isn’t Just Another Firmware Update
Every AMD Ryzen system boots through AGESA before your operating system ever loads. AGESA is a closed binary blob that AMD hands to motherboard makers, who wrap it in their own closed BIOS on top. Nobody outside AMD gets to read that code, patch it, or fully confirm what it does with the hardware access it has, all before Linux or Windows even start.
AMD has been talking about replacing AGESA since 2023, when it open-sourced a project called openSIL as the eventual successor. The plan was always a slow rollout, with production-grade support only arriving around the Zen 6 generation. 3mdeb didn’t wait for that timeline. The firmware shop took AMD’s early, proof-of-concept openSIL branch for Phoenix silicon, originally scoped for laptops, and got it booting a real desktop motherboard years ahead of AMD’s own schedule.
They’d already pulled off something similar back in May, porting the same coreboot and openSIL combination to the Gigabyte MZ33-AR1, an AMD EPYC server board. The MSI PRO B850-P WIFI release is the first time this stack has landed on a desktop board a regular person can buy and drop a gaming or home-server chip into.
What Dasharo v0.9.0 Actually Includes
This isn’t a stripped-down tech demo. The feature list reads like something out of a finished retail BIOS:
- UEFI Secure Boot
- A firmware TPM built into AMD’s PSP, giving full TPM 2.0 support (Measured Boot, BitLocker, Windows Hello) with no discrete TPM module required
- SMM write protection through AMD’s ROM Armor 3
- TCG OPAL and SATA disk password support
- Setup menu password protection
- Fast boot, using AMD’s memory context save and restore
- UEFI Capsule Update support, with a caveat covered below
- EZ Debug LEDs showing DRAM and CPU initialization progress
- Automatic detection of existing OS boot entries
3mdeb tested it against both Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Windows 11 25H2, and both boot cleanly. That second part matters more than it sounds. Getting Windows to boot on a from-scratch firmware port, with Secure Boot and TPM both fully functional, is usually the hardest milestone in a project like this, not the easiest.
The Catch That Isn’t in Most Headlines
Here’s the part that doesn’t make it into most of the excited headlines. Dasharo v0.9.0 does not run on “AMD Ryzen” as a whole. It runs on one motherboard, supporting one narrow slice of the Ryzen lineup.
Support is limited to AMD’s Phoenix silicon: the Ryzen 8000G series, meaning the 8700G, 8600G, 8500G, 8400G, and 8300G. Regular Ryzen 7000 chips, the entire Ryzen 9000 (Zen 5) lineup, and every X3D model, including the 3D V-Cache chips most people actually build gaming PCs around, are unsupported. They simply will not boot.
This isn’t a bug a future patch quietly fixes. It comes down to which openSIL branch AMD has actually published. AMD’s phoenix_poc branch only covers Phoenix silicon, so that’s the only source code 3mdeb has to work with. Until AMD releases an openSIL branch for Raphael or Granite Ridge, a Ryzen 9950X3D dropped into this exact same motherboard still will not power on with Dasharo installed.
3mdeb has only formally validated the release on a Ryzen 5 8600G, though the team expects any Ryzen 8000-series AM5 chip to work, with the 8700G as the most powerful option currently supported.
About That 79.1% Number
3mdeb tracks something it calls an openness score for every Dasharo port: how much the closed-source portion of the firmware shrinks compared to the vendor’s stock BIOS. Swapping MSI’s firmware for Dasharo on the B850-P WIFI cuts closed-source code by 79.1%.
That’s a big number, and it’s not heading to zero anytime soon. What’s left is almost entirely AMD’s PSP, the Platform Security Processor firmware that handles the earliest silicon bring-up. AMD does not publish that code. The chip won’t start without it, and the same structural limit applies to Intel platforms running their own closed FSP blobs. Open firmware can shrink how much of your system stays unreadable. On any modern x86 platform today, it cannot get that number all the way to zero.
3mdeb Is Upfront That It’s Not Finished
Credit where it’s due: the release notes don’t oversell this. Four known issues are documented directly in the announcement:
- Capsule updates don’t survive a reset. Only immediate updates complete. Interrupt a staged update with a reboot and it won’t finish, a limitation of how current AMD platforms handle capsule data in RAM.
- Power restoration after an outage doesn’t work properly. The board can only be set to always power on or always stay off after AC returns, not resume whatever state it was in before.
- Ubuntu 26.04 can hang on boot if serial console redirection is enabled. Turning that option off in setup avoids it.
- The onboard WiFi card occasionally disappears entirely, not showing up in the OS at all. A CMOS reset brings it back. For what it’s worth, MSI’s own stock firmware has the identical bug.
What’s Coming Next
3mdeb has already published a roadmap:
- Upstreaming the Phoenix and B850-P board code into mainline coreboot, and contributing the Phoenix-specific openSIL work back to AMD
- Fixing the four issues listed above
- Adding pre-boot DMA protection by configuring the IOMMU during firmware startup
- Building out suspend-to-idle (modern standby) support, which needs significant ACPI and board GPIO work
Don’t expect memory encryption on non-PRO chips anytime soon either. AMD blocks SME and TSME at the PSP level for consumer Ryzen, and only AMD can lift that restriction. 3mdeb has said plainly they won’t fight that battle alone. If AMD opens the door, they say they’ll walk through it.
How r/linux Reacted
The announcement picked up more than 600 upvotes on r/linux, and the comments split in a familiar way. One side celebrated the Secure Boot support and cross-OS compatibility as an impressive result for a young project, with plenty of people just relieved at the idea of AMD’s notoriously long boot times finally getting fixed. The other side pushed back fast: open firmware is a real win for transparency, several argued, but it doesn’t automatically mean better security while AMD’s PSP is still a closed, unauditable coprocessor sitting on the same die. A few said the real fix would be disabling the PSP entirely, the AMD equivalent of Intel’s Management Engine.
One of the more upvoted threads asked a fair technical question: does this replace AGESA’s job entirely, or is AGESA still running underneath it? According to another commenter, openSIL is built to replace AGESA outright. But whether any given board owner can actually flash it depends on how that vendor configured PSP enforcement at the factory. Lock it down tightly enough, and the chip will not release from reset for anything except signed, factory-approved firmware, openSIL included.
Someone else asked the obvious follow-up: does this work on any AM5 board yet? It doesn’t. Right now it’s this one MSI board, running this one narrow chip family, full stop.
Should You Actually Flash This?
For most people, not yet. This is a v0.9 release, and 3mdeb treats it that way in its own documentation. You’re a realistic candidate only if all of this is true:
- You own the exact MSI PRO B850-P WIFI, no substitutes accepted
- You’re running a Ryzen 8000G-series chip, ideally an 8600G or 8700G
- You’re comfortable flashing firmware yourself and accepting the small risk of bricking the board
- You value firmware transparency more than squeezing every last feature out of MSI’s stock Click BIOS
Worth knowing before you go shopping: 3mdeb picked up this board for around $179 back in February when the project started. Retail prices have climbed since, closer to $300 now at places like Amazon.
If that checklist doesn’t describe you, this is still worth bookmarking. It’s the clearest proof yet that open-source firmware on a modern AMD desktop isn’t a hypothetical sitting on some future roadmap. It’s a real board, running real, readable code, that you can order today, either as a DIY flash or as a pre-loaded bundle straight from 3mdeb’s own shop.
Quick Answers to Common Questions
Do I need a separate TPM chip?
No. AMD’s fTPM, running inside the PSP, covers Measured Boot, BitLocker, Windows Hello, and platform attestation on its own.
Does this support Heads for verified boot?
Not yet, and it isn’t an immediate priority. Heads is a separate coreboot payload built specifically for measured and verified boot, distinct from the EDK II UEFI payload this release uses, and porting it here would be its own project. It would also need a discrete GPU and ideally a discrete TPM, since graphics currently only initializes inside the UEFI environment.
Can AMD-restricted features like memory encryption ever get unlocked here?
Only if AMD decides to allow it. That restriction lives inside the PSP firmware itself, completely outside anything coreboot or openSIL can touch.
AMD is still years away from making openSIL the default on any Ryzen chip. A firmware consultancy in Poland, funded in part by the NLnet Foundation, didn’t wait around for that to happen. Whatever comes next for open AMD firmware, this is the board that proved it was possible first.
